Literature and Anthology
During his six-year stay in Hispanic America he completed his most famous book The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which was published anonymously in 1912. It was only during 1927 that Johnson admitted his authorship, stressing that it was not a work of autobiography but mostly fictional. His other works include The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), Black Manhattan (1930), his exploration of the contribution of African-Americans to the culture of New York, and Negro Americans, What Now? (1934), a book advocating civil rights for African Americans. Johnson was also an anthologist. His anthologies concerned African-American themes and were part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. He also wrote the melody for the song "Dem Bones".
Read more about this topic: James Weldon Johnson
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